In today's environment, a computing system often includes several components, such as servers, hard drives, and other peripheral devices. These components are generally stored in racks. For a large company, the storage racks can number in the hundreds and occupy huge amounts of floor space. Also, because the components are generally free standing components, i.e., they are not integrated, resources such as floppy drives, keyboards and monitors, cannot be shared.
A system has been developed by International Business Machines Corp. (IBM) of Armonk, N.Y., which bundles the computing system described above into a compact operational unit. The system is known as an IBM eServer BLADECENTER. The BLADECENTER is a 7U modular chassis that is capable of housing up to 14 individual server blades, A server blade, or blade, is a computer component that provides the processor, memory, hard disk storage and firmware of an industry standard server. Each server can be “hot-plugged” into a slot in the chassis. The chassis also houses supporting resources such as power, switch, management and blower modules, Thus, the chassis allows the individual blades to share the supporting resources.
Each server has a fibre channel card connecting it to a storage area network (SAN) drive from which it boots. A SAN drive is mapped to the world-wide port name (WWPN) of the channel card in the server that the SAN drive is to boot. When a change in the server occurs, for example a fibre channel card fails or is replaced, the server must be removed, the card replaced, the server reinserted to the BLADECENTER, and the server rebooted. However, the SAN drive for that server is not mapped to the WWPN of the new card, therefore the server will fail to boot.
In one scenario, an automatic deployment setting in the BLADECENTER will detect that the server with the new card is failing to boot and will proceed with initializing a new SAN drive from which the server may boot, a standard procedure for new equipment. This is time consuming, wasteful of resources, and unnecessary because the previous SAN boot drive is still capable of booting the server, however the new card and the previous SAN drive fail to recognize one another.
In another scenario, the server will simply fail to boot and require intervention by a technician to reconfigure the system.
Another example is a redundant array of independent disks (RAID). If one of the disks malfunctions and is replaced it may be with a disk that has downlevel firmware on it, relevant to the remaining disks in the redundant array of independent disks (RAID) system. The firmware in the new disk must be manually upgraded.
Accordingly, a need exists for a system and method for saving time, using resources already allocated in a system, saving money in repair technician time, and improving useability in a computer system. The invention addresses such a need.